“Would you have said that Richard Loughbury was an expert on antiques, Mr Purbright?”
The chief constable of Flaxborough, Mr Harcourt Chubb, spoke over his shoulder without looking round at his detective inspector. Mr Chubb commonly read the paper while standing, supported lightly against the fireplace and facing away from the main area of the office, as if to emphasize the triviality of such an occupation in the context of chief constabledom.
“He certainly seems to have been an expert on their acquisition, sir. We have his house on the special list.”
“I remember Mrs Chubb asking him to value something that had been in her family for quite a while; it was a snake—cobra, something of that kind—stuffed, of course—on a stand—and it had pegs fixed in it to hold ladies’ gloves. He didn’t strike me as being particularly knowledgeable.”
There was silence while the chief constable read to the end of the piece. Then, still without turning round, he raised his eyes from the paper and spoke with studied indifference to the ceiling cornice.
“There was some sort of a common law wife, I understand.”
“So I believe, sir.”
Mr Chubb waited a few more moments, said “Mmm,” and faced the room. He folded the Flaxborough Citizen neatly and held it out for Purbright to take. “I suppose,” he said, “that this makes her a common law widow.”
The funeral will take place tomorrow (Saturday) at Flaxborough Crematorium, following a service at Mumblesby Parish Church, conducted by the Vicar, the Rev. D. Kiverton, MA. Arrangements have been entrusted to Messrs K. Bradlaw and Son Ltd, undertakers, of Bride Street, Flaxborough.
“Oh, bloody hell!”
The sheafs of poly-tropulene gladioli trembled in their urns and brass tinkled in the tall case of coffin handle samples opposite the door. A stained glass hatch opened in the wall behind the long mahogany counter to disclose the almost exactly spherical head of a young man, steamy-faced, prematurely bald, with protuberant, anxious eyes and a 1930s film-star moustache.
“Now what’s wrong, father?” the young man asked. There was reproof in his tone: in his hand, which trembled, a chisel.
“Youd think they could get the sodding initial right for once. They’ve only to look at the advert.”
“The paper’s always getting things wrong. You know that. It’s not worth working up your blood pressure.”
Mr Bradlaw senior, correct initials N. A., tapped the offending column with his foot rule so angrily that the page ruptured. “And just look at that. Entrusted. ‘Arrangements have been entrusted...’ That’s what it says. Entrusted.” He looked up. “Of course, you know what they’re getting at?”
The undertaker’s general construction bore close resemblance to that of his son. They were both portly, of about the same height, and distinctly round-headed, with only a little pouch of a chin to mark the boundary between face and neck. Each had high colour, but to the son’s there was more shine. The father’s baldness, too, lacked lustre; the scalp now looked a size too big and it was pallid and deeply wrinkled as if it had been folded away for a long time in some dark cupboard.
“They’re not getting at anything, father. You’re too damn sensitive for your own good.”
Mr Bradlaws eyes bulged and their lids went into a rapid blink. “Just you watch the language, boy,” he admonished. His voice became husky. “You don’t have to spare my feelings, Melville. I suppose it’s nice to be ‘entrusted’ with things. I ought to be grateful. Old Nab the Lag. Alias K.”
“Father, for heaven’s sake! That was twenty years ago.”
Mr Bradlaw conveyed his opinion of time’s healing powers in a short, humourless laugh. He then looked at his watch and reached beneath the counter for the wing collar and black silk tie that he had discarded in order to read the inaccuracies and innuendos of the Flaxborough Citizen in greater comfort, reassumed them with a single lasso-like movement, and made for the door leading to the street.
At the door, he turned.
“Did you ring Alf Blossom about the extra Daimler?”
“It’s in the yard now. Oh, by the way...”
Melville’s face disappeared from the hatch. After a few moments, he came through the door from the workshop. He was holding a tangle of broad white ribbon.
“Nobody thought to say anything. Good job I noticed.” Nab Bradlaw snatched the ribbon. He said, “Jesus!” so tightly that it sounded like Cheeses, then: “What in hell does he think we’re running—a bloody honeymoon hotel?”
His son held out his hand. “I’ll get Betty to roll it up, then it can be put in the Daimler when it gets back from the Crem.”
For answer, Bradlaw stuffed Mr Blossom’s tribute to Hymen into a sample cremation casket. “Have it dyed first thing Monday. The bearers’ hats could do with jigging up a bit.”
Melville looked shocked. “You can’t pinch it. That stuff costs the earth.”
“Well, it’ll teach Alf Blossom not to entrust me with his jaunting gear another time, won’t it, boy? The trouble with Alf’s garage is that the boss has a one-track mind. That’s no way to run a decent business.”
“I don’t see that hiring wedding cars gives him a one-track mind, as you put it.”
Mr Bradlaw Senior lowered his head and regarded Melville with melancholy admonition. “Don’t you, boy? Don’t you really?” He sighed, and went out into Bride Street.
Chapter Two
The village of Mumblesby, or, to give it its full name, Mumblesby Overmarsh with Ganby, had been a ruined hamlet a quarter of a century before. Its church had begun to moulder through disuse; half the houses were empty; the watermill by the choked stream had been broken-wheeled and roofless. A few agricultural labourers, obedient to the calls of Farmers Benjamin Croll, Arthur Pritty, and the Gash Brothers, had still lived in tied cottages with their sad-faced wives and a flock of timid, staring, fleet-footed children, but they had seen the arrival of the first of the great machines, like green and yellow dinosaurs, that soon would replace them in the fields. The vicar of that time, an incredibly ancient man, was walled up with his dog, housekeeper and bottles of linctus in the grey, moss-streaked parsonage, unseen by his parishioners except once a week when the housekeeper changed his bedclothes: then, for a little while, the old man could be glimpsed sitting at the window of a downstairs room, wrapped in a sheet as if hopeful of a place in the next hearse that might chance along. There had been no traffic, though, past the parsonage in those days, either to the overgrown churchyard or, in the opposite direction, along the broad footpath to the Red Lion Inn, which the farmers could reach more conveniently in their Daimlers, Jaguars and Mercedes by the main road.